February 28: I survived the 300 mile, 52-hour sail from Puerto Rico to the Turks & Caicos

Leon & I dropped anchor today at Georgetown in the Bahamas, & I think we can say that we have now earned our “water warrior” badges. We long ago earned our “road warrior” badges, with all the miles we did going to & from craft shows for 20 years. Since leaving boatyard in Grenada 48 days ago, we have traveled 1300 miles,  sailed for 31 of those days, stopped in 14 different countries, and slept in 30 different anchorages.

We haven’t been off the boat at all since February 18, in San Juan. Since then, we’ve been stopping only to sleep at an anchorage, and from Aricebo in Puerto Rico to Big Sand Cay in the Turks & Caicos, we didn’t do even that. And now I can honestly say that I KNOW I don’t like to sail through the night. It’s no longer a suspicion, but a tested theory. Here’s what our 52 hours from Aricebo to Big Sand Cay was like:

Weather-wise, the first day and night we had a good strong breeze from the east with fairly large sea swells; the next day the winds died down quite a bit, but the seas were still up; and on the last both the wind & seas had died down ( so that we ended up motor-sailing the last 4 hours of the trip). For those of you who have never spent much time on a mono-hull, that means that the first day and night, since we were sailing on a reach, Mupepe was leaning to one side at what feels like a 45 degree angle while simultaneously dipping her bow in & out of the water with the swells. So to do anything on board (walk, use the toilet, get food out of the cupboard, etc) requires defying gravity and holding onto something solid with at least one hand at the same time. And since you can’t open any of the portholes or hatches (=windows) and this is a warm climate, the interior of the boat gets incredibly stuffy. Add to this the fact that you don’t wash any dishes because it’s  too difficult to do one-handed while being tossed about, and you can easily imagine that the best place to be is in the cockpit. Which is about the size of the interior of a car, only with much harder seats. For 52 hours!!!

Then there’s the matter of sleep. I took the evening shift, 6 until midnight, and Leon took the night watch (midnight to 6). Here you are, dying to lie down & get some rest, and the only feasible place to stretch out is in the salon. Besides the stuffiness, it’s incredibly noisy down below when you’re sailing on a windy night- all the rigging slaps & bangs and every jar in the cupboard rattles, as do the doors. Not to mention that the water tanks are right under the beds, so you hear the water sloshing back & forth in the tanks.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any more uncomfortable, Harley (our cat) found a way to make it so.  Either unwilling or unable to defy gravity to jump into her littler box (which, I will admit, was located on the high side of the boat with its opening toward the down side) she decided to defecate right where she was-which happened to be on our bed. So now we have the aroma of cat turd added to the melee.

Fortunately, for my sanity, the next morning the wind died down quite a bit, so sailing was considerably smoother, relatively speaking.

52 hours later, our GPS tells us that we are 10 miles from our destination, Sand Cay. We are elated & begin to eagerly scan the horizon. Nada. 3 miles later still nothing but water on the horizon…we begin to panic…. did we enter the wrong waypoint in our system & are on the wrong course??

Where's the Cay?

We quickly double check our current position on the chart…it looks correct…we should be just 7 miles from our long-awaited anchorage. Finally, a couple of miles later, we see it- a flat little oasis of sand in the midst of these large seas. A tiny uninhabited spit of sand, with no one else at anchor with us. But at least we get to drop anchor…….

Now I can say that I am SO glad to resume our habit of dropping anchor every day by cocktail hour.

For the next 7 days, we journey across the large expanse of seas from the Turks & Caicos to Georgetown, the first settlement of any size in the Bahamas. We did anchor at Mayaguana Cay (pop. 400) & Rum Cay (pop. 70), which are beautiful snorkeling grounds, but didn’t go ashore. During this week we saw more sea mammals than we did other boats. Total other boats sighted=10; mammals=20 (a large pod of dolphins, and a pod of about 6 orca whales that swam with Mupepe for a while).

Dark blue to light blue, as we go over the bank, frpm 600' to 30'

10 days & 670 miles later, we are both SO glad to pull into Georgetown, a veritable cruisers’ “city”, with about 300 boats, including several cruising mega-yachts, at anchor off Stocking Island. Ribs, fries, & a Rum punch at KB’s Chat n Chill hit the spot.

Eileen

Albacore Tuna for dinner tonight